Rio de Janeiro, December 10, 2009. TAP Maintenance and Engineering Brazil has received certification from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to perform heavy maintenance on Airbus A330 and A340 airplanes. This was granted last month, enabling the Company to perform maintenance on airplanes registered in Europe, and the first aircraft is already scheduled to arrive at TAP M&E Brazil’s facilities.

TAP M&E Brazil has already successfully performed the first heavy maintenance on an A330 airplane, which was delivered to Canada’s Air Transat, early in November, within the agreed-upon turn-around time (TAT). In January, the first A330 airplane registered in Europe (GS-TOG), which belong to the Company’s controller, TAP Portugal, will arrive at the hangar of TAP M&E Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro.

“Now, only the A320 family is left,” explains Engineer Nestor Mauro Koch, President of TAP M&E Brazil, when speaking of the Company’s growth strategy. “I would repeat that TAP M&E Brazil decided, since last year, to heavily invest in increasing its capability, in order to become even more competitive. The aeronautical industry is a global industry and we must be prepared to receive any model of airplane from any part of the world. In the case of Airbus, we lack only the certification for the A320 family, and the entire Company is steadily working to achieve this in the first half of 2010.”

TAP M&E Brazil is a member of the Airbus MRO Network (companies accredited by Airbus to perform maintenance on its aircraft) as an affiliate of TAP Maintenance and Engineering.

The Company is also certified by several other countries where it has customers, such as Angola, Argentina, Chile, Bermuda, Bolivia, Canada, Cuba, and Peru.